In the meantime, I have started work on the next monograph, a provisional outline of which is as follows:

Posthuman Buddhism is a new book project currently in development.
Ideas for the monograph have their root in a number of different theoretical domains
but share common ground insofar as they variously confront questions of
selfhood and embodiment in the digital age. The book approaches these questions
by framing its discussion around philosophical and anthropological perspectives
that span two very different fields of study. Firstly, addressing debates in
communication studies that explore phenomenological and non-media-centric approaches
to digital media practices, Posthuman
Buddhism provides insights into the embodied materialities of posthuman
media cultures, where digital communications serve as much an ontological as
instrumental function (provoking the question ‘what does it mean to be
posthuman in the digital media age?’). Secondly, grappling with some of the
spatial and temporal implications of posthuman media materialities, Posthuman Buddhism draws on ideas that
speak to, and are illuminated by, strands of Buddhist thought and practice
(provoking the question ‘what does it mean to be “mindful” in the digital media
age?’).

The motivation for writing the
book stems from a desire to explore more fully a number of interrelated themes,
some of which have started to feed into content covered on a course I teach at
the University of Liverpool called Media,
Self and Society (which, from 2018-19, will be re-named Posthuman Culture and Society and
co-taught with my colleague David Hill). The introductory lecture on the course
was written in the days following the death of David Bowie in January 2016. Responding
to that event, the lecture sought to examine concepts of the ‘postmodern self’
by reflecting, in part, on the shape-shifting and fluid identities that were a
hallmark of Bowie’s cultural persona. It did so by bringing the idea of
creative changefulness, exemplified by Bowie, into dialogue with Buddhist
notions of impermanence and non-self (and by briefly touching on Bowie’s own
long-standing flirtation with Buddhism). Posthuman
Buddhism builds on these introductory reflections on culture, media and the
postmodern self to consider broader issues that draw together posthuman media
materialities and Buddhist praxis. These include the use of digital devices and
mindfulness apps as tools to aid meditation practice; the rhythmanalytical and
experiential affects of ‘slow media’ on embodied understandings of time; and
the production and consumption of mediated ‘spaciousness’ and its impacts on
everyday phenomenologies of the self.